Chemo and Catheters

We arrived at 6 am on Wed. July 8 at the Huntsman Cancer Hospital. Our room was a beautiful suite with an adjoining family room. The view was tremendous, overlooking the whole Salt Lake Valley from the Capitol up north all the way to the point of the mountain down south. Craig was feeling uneasy about the whole thing until we were placed in this room and then he felt a sense of relief and comfort. We were able to sit in the family room and get away from the hospital look of his room for a few minutes. They hooked him up to an IV to begin pumping fluids in him before the procedure at 1 pm. He relaxed and snoozed a little while they prepared him for the main event. At 1 pm they took him to the radiology suite by wheelchair. He was placed on a table and told to stay still while they performed the chemoembolization of his liver. He was under conscious sedation so they could tell him to hold his breath when they zapped the tumors. They entered through the main artery in his groin and fed a catheter all the way up to his liver and delivered the chemo to the tumors as best they could. Craig's anatomy has some twists and turns in the arteries which made it difficult to get directly to the tumors. After about 4 hours into the procedure Craig's bladder was full and he had to go real bad. He held it an additional hour, but by then he was so blocked up he was in intense pain. They tried to put a catheter in him to relieve his discomfort. Unfortunately they messed up while inserting the catheter and didn't get it all the way into the bladder so it was stuck in the urethra. All the attention given to his relieving himself made it impossible for him to get much relief. It was a desperate situation for him that still gives him nightmares.

The dr. said about 1/2 the liver was treated with chemo. She said, "A smaller amount of chemo was delivered over a larger area of the liver" where they had hoped to direct a larger amount of chemo to a smaller portion of the liver to avoid collateral damage to the liver.

Once he came back to the room about 7 pm he was in a lot of pain; not from the liver treatment but from the placement of the catheter during the procedure. The catheter was also leaking and he was laying in his own urine. He had to stay still in bed for 6 hours after the chemo so the catheter had to stay in place during that time and maybe until the next morning. The nurses tried to adjust the catheter to relieve his pain but it was so irritated by now that it was impossible to feel relief and everything they did just made it worse. They pumped some pain meds in him which didn't help for awhile so I did all I could to calm him and keep his head down when the pain got intense. After about 2 hours of this they finally reinserted the catheter and got it in the right place and the drugs kicked in and he was able to rest. It was a very tough night for all of us. He made it through the night without a lot of pain and was able to get up in the morning and shower with the incision and IV site covered. He was a new man! He ate 2 omelets for breakfast since he hadn't been able to eat all day Wed. We hung around Huntsman most of the day Thursday while they continued to check his vitals and pump more fluid into him and came home about 7 pm. He had made it through his first chemo treatment! He says that if it was going to be like that each time he would never do it again. We know now what needs to be done before he goes in. Too bad the nurses and doctor hadn't figured that out before this!?!